The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
As any parent will attest, there is nothing more important than the safety of your child. For this reason, manufacturers of child seats such as car seats, booster seats, child wheelchairs, strollers, and highchairs, for example, spend a great deal of time and money to ensure their products meet or exceed safety standards. As such, secondary items that function to provide additional comfort and/or soothing to a child must not interfere with the restraint and/or safety features of the seat.
Regardless of how safe a child seat is, the simple fact remains that young children quickly become upset when they are placed into such a seat. Whether the child is undergoing a bout of anxiety, colic or they are simply restless, the inability of young children to self soothe causes the displeasure of the child to increase exponentially the longer he or she remains in the seat.
For this reason, there are many known products that are designed to afford some level of comfort to children when riding in a car seat. Among the most popular products include a white noise machine and a child pacifier. Although useful in their own rights, neither product makes physical contact with the body of the child in a manner that imparts a sense of security and/or comfort to the child in the same or similar manner as what the child would experience if they were being held by a parent.
Accordingly, it would be beneficial to provide a weighted car seat lap pad that can provide a feeling of security to a young child while not interfering with the safety features of a child seat.